art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

of cultural development meant to be a resistant counter-point to neo-liberalism or a
means of accommodating to it? The evidence suggests the latter.
We need to consider the ideological mediation of culture and economy at different
levels and in various contexts. Theoretical critique of neo-liberal thought and practice
is necessary but what captures my attention most, as a cultural analyst rather than
a political economist, is the command of neo-liberalism over popular consciousness
and everyday life.
Culture and Ideology
Quite apart from strengths and weaknesses at the philosophical level, ideological
sway is greatest at the popular level, in effect, when it becomes common sense. This
is most evident in ordinary discourse, our mundane use of words and the contexts
in which we use them (Cameron, 2000). Neo-liberalism promotes the language of
branding, consumer sovereignty, market reasoning and management but not only at
work. It is painfully evident in what Alissa Quart (2003) calls ‘the buying and selling of
teenagers’. Also, you have a Harvard business professor, Rachel Greenwald, publishing
an advice book for young women, The Programme – 15 Steps to Finding a Husband
After Thirty, written in the language of management and marketing. Female singleton’s
are exhorted to adopt ‘a strategic plan’ and to cultivate ‘a personal brand’ in order to
situate themselves advantageously in the marketplace of coupling and improve their
terms of trade in close relationships (Walter, 2004: 25). Love just don’t come into.
This is merely one symptom of a much more pervasive sociological process that has
been described as ‘the commercialization of intimate life’ (Hochschild, 2003).
Somewhere between the higher reaches of theory and the lower reaches of
popular culture on the ground is the role of expertise in a neo-liberal frame. In their
diatribe against neo-liberal discourse, the late Pierre Bourdieu with the aid of Loic
Wacquant (2001) identified two types of expert. First, there is ‘the expert’ proper
employed in ministries, company headquarters and think tanks whose task is to
come up with technical justifications and scenarios for neo-liberal policy decisions
that are actually made on ideological rather than spuriously technical grounds.
Second, ‘there is the communication consultant to the prince’, who is not only your
run-of-the-mill spindoctor but a much grander type as well. The consultant may
be ‘a defector from the academic world entered into the service of the dominant,
whose mission is to give an academic veneer to the political projects of the new
state and business nobility’ (p5). Bourdieu and Wacquant’s exemplary instance of
such a figure is the British sociologist, Anthony Giddens, theorist of ‘the Third Way’
and ideologue for neoliberalism in social-democratic clothing at home and abroad,
Tony Blair’s own Dr Pangloss.
Bourdieu and Wacquant argue that what they call ‘NewLiberalSpeak’ is a ‘new
planetary vulgate’. Certain words are repeated continually, such as ‘globalisation’,
‘flexibility’, ‘governance’, ‘employability’, ‘underclass’, ‘exclusion’, words that are
difficult for any of us to avoid using. Other words are not so speakable in polite
company, indeed virtually unspeakable, such as ‘class’, ‘exploitation’, ‘domination’
and ‘inequality’.
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